President Trump renewed his attacks against CNN, which he has repeatedly called "fake news," with a violent tweet on July 2, days after CNN retracted a story about ties between a Trump associate and a Russian investment fund. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

The user whose screen name is a vulgar corruption of “Han Solo” spent about a year on Reddit before attaining stardom, courtesy of a share from President Trump.

The user found more success posting on r/The_Donald, an extremely popular Reddit subgroup specializing in the idolization of Trump and the denigration of his imagined enemies — often through the most offensive means possible.

Thus Han‑‑‑‑‑‑‑Solo’s offering on Wednesday: A GIF of Trump pummeling Vince McMahon at a long-ago WrestleMania, with a CNN logo superimposed over McMahon’s face.

The Washington Post couldn’t find any version of the CNN-pummeling clip before Han——-Solo’s post last week. And the user took credit for it, while noting that someone added sound and made other alterations to the version Trump tweeted.

But it almost doesn’t matter where the meme really came from. On r/The_Donald, where dubious claims have long mixed with reality, Trump’s endorsement of a homegrown GIF is now accepted as canon and lore.

“You know he saw it, chuckled, and knew he could control the media narrative for days by hitting the ‘post’ button,” wrote American_Crusader. “So he did.”

“If we could give him that, imagine what else we could provide the God-Emperor in Chief with?” a moderator for the group added.

This isn’t the first time r/The_Donald has praised itself for getting inside the gears of a system its users claim to hate.

As Abby Ohlheiser noted for The Post, users took credit when Reddit tweaked its algorithm last year, trying to stop subgroups from mass-voting their posts onto the site’s front page — a favorite tactic on r/The_Donald.

When those posts aren’t about GIFs endorsed by the president, they’re often insults against liberals, with frequent forays into conspiracy theories and intentionally offensive memes.

Take the now-debunked story that a Democratic National Committee staff member was killed because he leaked party emails. “The_Donald’s front page was flooded with threads promoting the Seth Rich story as users claimed that the website’s administrators were intentionally downvoting the story,” the Daily Dot wrote in May.

Han‑‑‑‑‑‑‑Solo appears to be part of that campaign, posting a conspiratorial meme about Rich on r/The_Donald in May.